In this vividly written and amply illustrated book, Gay L. Gullickson analyzes the representations of women who were part of the insurrection known as the Paris Commune. The uprising and its bloody suppression by the French army is still one of the most hotly debated episodes in modern history. Especially controversial was the role played by women, whose prominent place among the Communards shocked many commentators and spawned the legend of the pétroleuses, women who were accused of burning the city during the battle that ended the Commune. In the midst of the turmoil that shook Paris, the media distinguished women for their cruelty and rage. The Paris-Journal, for example, raved: "Madness seems to possess them; one sees them, their hair down like furies, throwing boiling oil, furniture, paving stones, on the soldiers." Gullickson explores the significance of the images created by journalists, memoirists, and political commentators, and elaborated by latter-day historians and political thinkers. The pétroleuse is the most notorious figure to emerge from the Commune, but the literature depicts the Communardes in other guises, too: the innocent victim, the scandalous orator, the Amazon warrior, and the ministering angel, among others. Gullickson argues that these caricatures played an important role in conveying and evoking moral condemnation of the Commune. More important, they reveal the gender conceptualizations that structured, limited, and assigned meaning to women as political actors for the balance of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.

The Encyclopedia of Women in World History captures the experiences of women throughout world history in a comprehensive, 4-volume work. Although there has been extensive research on women in history by region, no text or reference work has comprehensively covered the role women have played throughout world history.The past thirty years have seen an explosion of research and effort to present the experiences and contributions of women not only in the Western world but across the globe. Historians have investigated womens daily lives in virtually every region and have researched the leadership roles women have filled across time and region. They have found and demonstrated that there is virtually no historical, social, or demographic change in which women have not been involved and by which their lives have not been affected. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History benefits greatly from these efforts and experiences, and illuminates how women worldwide have influenced and been influenced by these historical, social, and demographic changes.The Encyclopedia contains over 1,250 signed articles arranged in an A-Z format for ease of use. The entries cover six main areas: biographies; geography and history; comparative culture and society, including adoption, abortion, performing arts; organizations and movements, such as the Egyptian Uprising, and the Paris Commune; womens and gender studies; and topics in world history that include slave trade, globalization, and disease. With its rich and insightful entries by leading scholars and experts, this reference work is sure to be a valued, go-to resource for scholars, college and high school students, and general readers alike.

Theirs was a discreet, relational feminism, which they expressed by considering their relationships to themselves and to others. Because they were less political (and thus less well known) than other feminists, these three women have been neglected by historians and literary theorists. But they are thus more representative of a generation of women who often wrote about, but did not necessarily act on, their independent ideas. For them, writing was transgression enough."--BOOK JACKET.

This new social history of France in the 19th century goes beyond the traditional focus of class and class conflict, religion and anticlericalism to explore new areas such as crime and punishment, medicalisation, consumerism and gender.

Colette Wilson writes clearly and authoritatively and her original, scholarly and beautifully illustrated book makes a strong contribution to our understanding of the Paris Commune, its aftermath in the early years of the Third Republic and French cultural memory overall

Women of the D���¡il explores the role of political women during the Irish revolution, specifically those who were D���¡il deputies and related to recently-deceased patriots. These women successfully used familial links to bolster their political credibility during the years after the Easter Rising, but found this rhetorical strategy much more difficult to deploy in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Drawing on a number of published and unpublished sources, Women of the D���¡il analyzes this rhetorical shift in order to explain the interplay between gender, republicanism and the Irish revolution.